As AI becomes the interface, the real design challenge isn't what employees see, it's whether they feel understood.
Twenty years ago, I was not thinking about employees or the enterprise experience gaps that were surfacing.
I was thinking about the person on the couch, in the living room. The one holding a remote control, flipping through 500 channels, trying to find something worth watching. My job was to innovate. To envision something brand new for the consumer with amazing companies, including TiVo, WebTV, Cisco, AOL, Fandango, Showtime, HBO, TV Guide, Comcast, and many others. I needed to collapse the distance between that person and the moment they stopped searching and started watching.
That problem sounds simple. It was not. It required understanding human behavior at a level most engineers didn't think about. It required obsessing over friction, the half-second pause, the confusing menu, the sonic branding and verbal recognition that something happened, the recommendation that missed by one degree. It required believing that design was not just a beautiful interface. It was the difference between an experience people loved and one they abandoned.
I am so grateful for that part of my life and that experience. The collaboration, the excitement, the relationships built, the level of innovation, it was all extraordinary. I was also fortunate to receive two Emmy Awards for the work. But the awards don't really matter. What mattered was what they recognized: innovation in experience design changes how people feel about technology. It builds trust. It builds loyalty. It changes behavior in ways that data and technology alone never predict.
I carried that belief with me when I made the decision to leave telco, media and entertainment to join the world of ServiceNow, to see if experiential design could have the same impact for the enterprise, for the employee, as it did for the consumer.
Why Enterprise, Why Then and Why Now
The honest answer is that the media and telecommunications industry was changing and consolidating. I wanted a new challenge, a new opportunity to transform the enterprise.
Consumer experiences had been transformed. The apps we use in our personal lives to travel, to bank, to Uber, to find entertainment had been obsessively refined. Friction was the enemy. Delight was the goal.
Then I watched people go to work. The contrast was jarring. Smart, capable people navigating portals that looked archaic.
Submitting requests into systems that provided no acknowledgment, no visibility, no sense that anything had happened. Searching for answers across hundreds of different tools. Waiting.
The enterprise experience was broken. Not because the technology didn't exist. Because nobody had applied the same conviction to fix it.
That is why I came into the ServiceNow ecosystem. I believed that how people experienced work and how they experienced the rest of their lives was a problem worth solving. A problem I knew how to think about.
What ServiceNow Is Building and Why It Deserves Recognition
Innovation and the concept of reimagination and reinvention is imperative in today's world.
ServiceNow recently released EmployeeWorks, Otto and Slate, all born from the Moveworks acquisition, and all are genuine innovations, not incremental improvements. Not a portal refresh. A fundamental shift for the employee experience and their workplace. Each of these experiences are at the center of that thinking.
ServiceNow was a recognized leader in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Employee Experience for Integrated Employee Workspaces 2025, and Moveworks is trusted by global enterprises such as Siemens, Toyota, and Unilever, used by 5.5 million employees. Companies such as CVS Health saw a 50% reduction in live agent chats in 30 days across IT, HR, and store operations.
EmployeeWorks is the AI front door for employees that empowers users to find, search, and act across hundreds of business applications seamlessly through a single interface. It's contextually aware, highly personalized, and provides autonomous workflow north, south, east, and west across the organization.
Otto is a unified, enterprise-wide AI experience that sits across the ServiceNow platform, making AI native across every workflow and across every product.
Slate is ServiceNow's new AI-first, conversation-driven employee experience designed to replace traditional click-and-browse intranets with a dynamic interface layer that adapts to the employee, surfacing what is relevant based on role, context, recent activity, and what the platform knows is likely needed next. It is not a homepage. It is a living workspace that changes with the person using it. Combined with Otto's conversational layer, Slate means employees no longer have to navigate to find help. Help finds them.
These experiences represent something I have not seen in enterprise software before: a commitment to meeting employees where they are, with what they actually need, in the moment they need it. No ticket numbers. No knowing which system to ask. No taxonomy to memorize. Employees need actions, not only answers, and want outcomes, not just responses. For CIOs evaluating Copilot, Glean, or ChatGPT Enterprise, ServiceNow doesn't just answer, it completes the work across hundreds of enterprise systems.
ServiceNow's new approach to employee experience deserves the same recognition TiVo received as the first experience that understood what you wanted to watch. It earns that recognition because it starts with the human, not the system.
The New Frontier and Its Challenges
Every frontier changes the people who cross it. And this one is changing something fundamental about the craft I deeply care about.
For twenty years, the work of a user experience designer was clear: understand the human, map the journey, reduce the friction, test and iterate. The output was a design, an interaction model, a set of intentional decisions about what a person would see, touch, and feel. The designer held the pen.
That is no longer entirely true.
When AI becomes the interface, when Otto listens, interprets, routes, and resolves, the traditional design surface shrinks. You are no longer designing a screen. You are designing a behavior. You are designing trust. You are designing the invisible architecture of how an AI decides to respond, what tone it uses, when it escalates, and when it acts on its own.
The opportunities are not the same. There is no wireframe for a conversation that doesn't happen the same way twice. There is no pixel-perfect spec for an AI agent that adapts in real time to context it was never explicitly trained for.
The challenges are not the same either. The old risk was a confusing menu. The new risk is an AI that confidently does the wrong thing, and the employee has no idea where the error entered. Designing for that failure mode requires a different vocabulary entirely.
This is not a reason to step back from the frontier. It is a reason to step forward with more rigor, more humility, and more honesty about what we don't yet know.
What Makes an AI Experience Feel Trustworthy to Employees?
I think about the lessons that transferred from the consumer to the enterprise. They transfer again here.
The best experiences were never about the technology. They were about the moment a person stopped being frustrated and started feeling understood. TiVo did not win awards because it had a hard drive. It won because it felt like it knew you.
That same question, “what does it feel like to be understood by a system?” is the one the entire industry is now chasing.
The breakthroughs in large language models that OpenAI and others pioneered have permanently raised the bar for what conversational AI can do. The quest for the enterprise isn't raw model capability, it's whether AI can be trusted to act on behalf of a real person, inside a real workflow, with real consequences, and if AI can be embedded into the organizational DNA. AI transformation is a human endeavor, and today we must empower every employee with the skills and confidence to use AI in ways that drive innovation. We need to help people maximize their potential, make work more meaningful, and free up time for creativity and purpose. That is where the experience layer matters most, and that is where Ondaro spends much of its time.
The experiences ServiceNow is building with EmployeeWorks, Otto, and Slate will not win because of the model underneath or the architecture behind it. They will win because employees feel understood, and asking for help at work feels as natural as asking your phone for directions.
ServiceNow is innovating at a speed second to none. This is a company that acquired Moveworks not just for the technology, but for the belief that employees deserve a conversational experience as capable as the best consumer AI they use every day. The ServiceNow platform brings together ServiceNow's trusted agentic AI capabilities and intelligent workflows with Moveworks' intuitive front-end AI assistant, enterprise search, and agentic reasoning engine, creating an enterprise AI platform that turns conversations into completed work.
It is a company that built Slate not to modernize a portal, but to eliminate the concept of navigating to get help. It is a company whose leadership stands on a stage and makes commercial guarantees to go live in under 100 days because they believe the experience will actually deliver. That is not the posture of a platform company adding features. That is the posture of a company that has decided innovation and employee experience is worth fighting for.
Twenty years of consumer experience taught me what that conviction looks like when it is real. I have spent enough time watching enterprises settle for less to know how rare it is.
ServiceNow is not settling. And neither are we.
At Ondaro, that conviction is not theoretical. The measure of it is in the work and in the companies that trust us to get it right.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals won the ServiceNow Employee Portal of the Year in 2024, along with Visa in the top 10. This year, the NBA and UCLA Health joined that list, placing Ondaro amongst a rare group of partners with 4 top 10 finishers in the last 2 years. Four extraordinary organizations. Four teams that believe the employee experience was worth fighting for and were willing to build something genuinely new to prove it. That trust is not something we take for granted. It is what we build toward every day.
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